Most bikes still unclaimed after public viewing in Marin theft investigation

The Corte Madera man said his daughter, wife and ex-wife all had their bicycles stolen recently, so he went to the Marin County Civic Center on Sunday to search for them, hoping they were among the 130 or so bikes authorities seized in June from two Marin homes and a storage facility.

"It seems to me there's got to be a local gang doing this," Ernani said.

Like most of the 37 people who showed up hoping to find their missing bikes, Ernani left empty-handed after the three-hour showing, a last-ditch effort by authorities to reunite the allegedly stolen bikes with their possible owners before the courts decide what to do with them.

Authorities seized the bikes on June 24 from the home of Kentfield resident Rebecca Hammett, another residence in Corte Madera, and a storage facility in Greenbrae. The sheriff's department said Hammett, 48, was suspected of buying stolen bicycles from thieves and then reselling them.

She was initially charged with possession of stolen property, but the district attorney's office decided in July to dismiss the charge pending further investigation.

No other suspects have been charged in the case.

The bikes have since been held by the sheriff's department, which has fielded hundreds of emails and phone calls from prospective theft victims looking for their bikes.

Sheriff's Deputy Bo Dahlberg, who was among the personnel running Sunday's viewing, said "a few" of the bikes have been returned to the rightful owners.

But with most of the lot still unclaimed, the sheriff's department invited bike theft victims to come to the Civic Center to see if their stolen items were among the lot.

What the event revealed was that Marin bike theft problem that expands far beyond the June bust.

Every few minutes a person, couple or family would arrive at the viewing with paperwork and an ounce of hope. Sitting in his squad car's front passenger seat, Dahlberg would enter serial numbers of the theft victims' missing bikes into his car's computer.

In many cases, the numbers showed up on the computer screen. That didn't guarantee the bike was in the department's possession, but one by one, sheriff's Deputy Chris Gullett took each visitor to look through the bikes in a storage room the size of a one-car garage.

Only two people identified what they believed were their bikes, but neither had the proper identification — a police report, a serial number for the bicycle, or a purchase receipt — to claim it immediately.

"If we can help one person find their bike, I consider that a success," Dahlberg said.

Omar Martinez of San Rafael was the first to find a bike he thought was his, a green mountain bike that, until six weeks ago, he would ride on local trails with his 10-year-old son, Levi.

Levi's bike was also stolen from the family's Canal-area apartment complex, but they did not find it at the Sunday viewing.

"We're pretty happy for two things," Martinez said. "The first, we found the bike. The second, now it's safer in the neighborhood. (Because of the media attention on the case), the community knows people are stealing bikes, so when they see people who are not supposed to be there, who look like they're looking for something (to steal), people call the police or they confront them."

Besides Martinez, the deputies said one other man appeared to find his bike. He brought about 20 photographs identifying the velocipede, which Gullett said was a rare model and thus meant it was likely a match. But the prospective victim didn't have a serial number with him, and so needed to follow up with the sheriff's office to retrieve the bike.

Allan McLennan of Mill Valley went to the viewing in search of a mountain bike stolen from his garage in 2010, "just hoping" to find it. He didn't, but he did observe that many of the seized bikes worth several thousand dollars.

Deputy Gullett said bicycle thefts are a major problem in Marin, aided by a combination of a bustling bicycle culture and the county's above-average affluence that enables residents to spend several thousand dollars on their road or mountain bikes.

Dahlberg said the seized bikes come from all over the county, though a hotbed for thefts is in the wishbone-shaped corridor from downtown San Rafael west to Fairfax, then southeast along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to Corte Madera.

Many of the thefts occur at schools. A majority of them "are just crimes of opportunity," Dahlberg said.

This case, with so many unclaimed bicycles and so much difficulty matching people with their missing bikes, is a prime example of why people need to be more diligent about recording serial numbers of their more expensive goods, such as a bicycle or a television, Dahlberg said.

"It's not like a car with a VIN number," Dahlberg said, referring to vehicle identification numbers used by authorities to track automobiles.